Trouble in Paradise: Examining Discord between Nature and Society
February 28, 2009 - June 28, 2009
Artists are looking at the beauty and the terror in the forces of nature through their honest and emotional portrayals, while sending urgent messages to pay attention to the ravages society inflicts on the land through war and waste. This exhibition will examine a range of art in a variety of media that addresses extreme forces of nature in two basic categories: nature-based discord, such as lightning, tornadoes, volcanoes, hurricanes, and fire; and human-caused environmental discord such as pollution, over-population, global warming, oil field fires, atomic fallout, and destruction of land. The debate about how much of nature’s wrath is the result of human impact and interference is ongoing, but questions are posed through stunning visuals about the seemingly unstoppable cycle of cause and effect.Many of the artists in this exhibition, including Edward Burtynsky, Richard Misrach, William T. Wiley, Mark Dion, and Joel Peter Witkin, imbue their work with haunting messages while objectively documenting the reality before them. Others exalt in the awesome beauty of the power of nature without judgment of its genesis or its conclusion. While offering a selected survey of powerful works that address the forces of nature, this exhibition is far from a “doom and gloom” portrayal of earth’s and society’s current situation, nor does it attempt to solve environmental problems. What emerges from these works is not only a revelation of the pressing environmental problems of our times, but how artists see the world and share that message with stunning beauty and poetic resonance.
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